Part 1

LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO. 208 Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius

Debate on Birth Control

Margaret Sanger and Winter Russell

HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY GIRARD, KANSAS

Copyright, 1921 The Fine Arts Guild

Copyright, 1921 E. Haldeman-Julius

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Winter Russell FIRST SPEECH

Mr. Russell: Ladies and gentlemen. I am very glad to have the opportunity of speaking to you this afternoon, and I may say at the outset that it is obvious that my adversary and I agree upon one thing, and that is that we are discussing what is absolutely the most vital question before the American people today. (Applause.) We are absolutely in accord on that, and we are just as far opposed in our method of approach as it is possibly probable to be.

I want to say at the outset that we are going to deal—or I am, and I assume my adversary is, too—with ideals and principles and not with persons. I want you to realize that I consider myself speaking—and I trust reverently—on the most important subject that I have ever advocated.

I heard one of the greatest psychologists this country has ever produced who said “When you conceive of the mere handful of people that inhabit all the globe, and you think of the vast river of humanity that is flowing on this planet, and you think of the billions of unborn, you wonder if man sometimes transcends the impossible and thinks and considers the unborn as God himself,” and I believe today I am speaking in behalf of the great unborn—those who are being murdered by the thousands, if not millions, in a manner that far transcends the method of our warfare.

Now, I said that we are going to speak of ideals and principles and not of persons. It is very difficult oftentimes not to attack a person or hurt his feelings when you characterize the principle of an act, and you sometimes have to be assailing a person. I hope and I try to love every human being on the face of the earth. There are principles and ideals I abominate and abhor with every drop of blood and feeling that I have. I never want that abhorrence of the principle or ideal of the person to adhere to that person.

I heard a minister the other day speaking of the French and Germans who were having some conferences, and he was asked “did they still hate one another?” and he said they did not hate one another because they broke bread together and you could not hate a person with whom you have broken bread, and he could not hate anybody that he knew.

I hate and abominate the principles that I am fighting, but I trust that you will take the sting, fumigate it, take the anti-toxin, if you will, because I don’t want any allusions to personality to be taken from any of the statements that I make.

Another thing I want to say about my opponent, and I hope she will say the same about me, is that I want to bow in sincere respect and admiration for what I conceive to be her utter and absolute sincerity, and to her devotion to the cause which she advocates. I question that in no degree. I hope she will give me the same consideration.

We are going to deal with these principles. I am not going to concern myself much with authorities. I suppose she can quote from Dr. Robinson and apparently Dr. Knopf (he says he isn’t an authority,) and others as authorities. I could quote from Lamb and Roosevelt and the Bible—the great religions of the earth—scriptural authority that comes from the very depths of the spiritual, and what I believe to be the very mouth of God itself—of Nature—if you do not like to admit the existence of Providence.

I am not concerned with Scripture or authorities. I am going to deal with this question with what I believe are the cold, inevitable facts of life as we know them, and meet them every day.

Now I am going to admit in the first place that there are many families with too many children. It would be foolish to gainsay that. They are a burden to the mother. They are a hardship to the father who tries to provide for them. They make conditions unfair and unjust for the other children. The question is, and I hope that she will admit it also, that there are thousands of homes in the United States of America that are too lacking in children—although I think she has once stated that the most immoral thing a person can do is to bring a large family into the world—so we have thought, for example—and the question is, how are we going to meet it?

I propose that we should meet this problem by the measure of self-control. I believe by that means that we can solve the problem thusly, and at the same time we gain one of the greatest advantages that you can possibly win on the face of the earth. Sex control is the best path to self-control and to self-discipline. It is the key to wisdom. It is the key to power. It is the key to intellectual and mental development; indeed, she has once stated that only those people who are mentally developed are capable of self-control and I want to say that they got a large measure of their mental development by self-control. She is looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

And so we come to this method. I want as another part of my platform upon which I am to stand to say that I conceive and hold marriage to be more than physical. It is not a purely sensual relationship. It borders on the aesthetic, spiritual, mental, and modern aspects of life, and when you try to take the physical by itself you find a condition of naked sensuality, which is disastrous in the extreme.

My contentions are these: In the first place, fundamentally, virtually, universally, infinitely from every point of view; it is vicious, it is false from every scientific construction that you can possibly conceive of; it is one of the most vitiating things that you can conceive of from every point of philosophy, and physiology and psychology—in other words that you take the law of compensation and try to solve it. It is false from every point of view—from the practical point of view.

I believe it is disastrous intellectually, mentally, and spiritually. It is disastrous and perpetrates a great wrong upon the unborn millions who are waiting for entrance upon this great amphitheatre of life. It is disastrous physically, mentally, and spiritually upon the future. It is disastrous to the same degree upon the people who practice it—husbands and wives who resort to these measures and then I hold that it perpetrates the greatest crime of all the ages, namely, race suicide.

Let me approach the first method, and that is this question of whether it is right from the point of view of the philosophy of man, if you will, and I want you to consider it simply from the practical living point of view. I want to lay down this proposition—it is that you can’t have pleasure in this world without paying for it—that there are certain laws that sweep through the entire universe from the furtherest star to the tiniest atom and molecule that you can find in existence.

I am a member of the bar of the State of New York. I trust that I have due regard and respect for the statutes, the constitution and the laws of this great city, state and nation. But I hold them as the veriest trash when they come up against the laws of Nature. The laws of Nature cannot be revised. They cannot be repealed. There is no power in this whole universe that can change these laws and you have to deal with that.

That means you can’t get pleasure without paying for it. Nature is inexorable in bringing about her retribution. It does not need any balance book. You can never embezzle. You can’t cheat. You can’t get away from it.

Emerson has said that “the ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to the solution of one problem—how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensual bright from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair—that is again to contrive to cut clean off this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless to get a one end without an other end. The soul says eat, the body would feast. The soul says, ‘The man and woman shall be one flesh and one soul.’ The body would join the flesh only.”

“All things are double, one against another,” continued Emerson. “Tit for tat. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, blood for blood, measure for measure, love for love. Give it and it shall be given you. He that watereth shall be watered himself. What will you have, quoth God, pay for it and take it. Nothing ventured, nothing have. Thou shalt be paid exactly for what thou hast done, no more, no less. Who doth not work, doth not eat. Harm watch, harm catch. Curses always recoil on the head of him who imprecates them. If you chain a slave, one end chains you. Bad counsel confounds the adviser. The devil is an ass.”

You must pay at last your own debt. Those are the laws. Now we recognize it in physics. Energy cannot be annihilated. Birth control says “yes” you shall pay the price. You can annihilate that energy and drink from the cup of pleasure, but you don’t take the responsibility—the duty and the care. You recognize it in physics. You recognize it in chemistry, in every law of life. When Ponzi in Boston said, “I will give you 50 percent”—the world laughed because it can’t be done. Birth control advocates like the Ponzis say they will give you 50 percent and 100 percent on your investment, but it can’t be done. It is frenzied finance. It is along the lines of the people who are alchemists, who think they can turn the baser metals into gold. It is an age-long dream. It is a belief that has been held from the beginning of time. That thing cannot be done. That is the law of life—of God—that you have to pay.

And so that is the thing you are confronted with. I don’t say that you don’t seem to gain, but for every gain you seem to grasp you have lost the life of it. He who does not work shall not eat. The trouble is that we are bound by the fetish of money, of gold, and lose sight. In other words we have eyes literally that see not, and ears that hear not.

And that is the thing that we must consider. So I want you to have in mind, that by the very law of life, the very theory of science of our being, we have to pay, and if we take that, if we try to grasp that we are going to pay the penalty. In my next opportunity to address you I shall take up that to show you how we pay. (Applause.)

Margaret Sanger FIRST SPEECH

Mrs. Sanger: Mr. Chairman, and ladies and gentlemen. Mr. Russell and I seem to agree on some of the points of this argument at least, but as usual with most opponents of birth control, they have absolutely no intelligent argument. (Laughter.) They always barricade themselves behind the Bible or the terrible vengeance of an offended nature. That is exactly what Mr. Russell is doing now.

Now, friends, I want to say let us get down to fundamental principles. Let us get together and look at life the way it is now, not as it might have been had Nature acted thus and so, not as it might be had God done thus and so, but as we find ourselves today. We have a few principles of life by which we must live, and I claim that every one of us has a right to health, to liberty and to the pursuit of happiness. I say furthermore that birth control is an absolutely essential factor in our living and having those three principles of happiness. (Applause.)

By birth control, I mean a voluntary, conscious control of the birth rate by means that prevent conception—scientific means that prevent conception. I don’t mean birth control by abstinence or by continence or anything except the thing that agrees with most of us, and as we will develop later on, most of us are glad that there are means of science at the present time that there are not injurious, not harmful, and all conception can be avoided.

Now let us look upon life as it really is, and we see society today is divided distinctly into two groups: those who use the means of birth control and those who do not.

On the one side we find those who do use means in controlling birth. What have they? They are the people who bring to birth few children. They are the people who have all the happiness, who have wealth and the leisure for culture and mental and spiritual development. They are people who rear their children to manhood and womanhood and who fill the universities and the colleges with their progeny. Nature has seemed to be very kind to that group of people. (Laughter.)

On the other hand we have the group who have large families and have for generations perpetuated large families, and I know from my work among these people that the great percentage of these people that are brought into the world in poverty and misery have been unwanted. I know that most of these people are just as desirous to have means to control birth as the women of wealth. I know she tries desperately to obtain the information, not for selfish purposes, but for her own benefit and for that of her children. In this group, what do we have? We have poverty, misery, disease, overcrowding, congestion, child labor, infant mortality, maternal mortality, all the evils which today are grouped in the crowd where there are large families of unwanted and undesired children.

Take the first one and let us see how these mothers feel. I claim that a woman, whether she is rich or poor, has a right to be a mother or not when she feels herself fit to be so. She has just as much right not to be a mother as she has to be a mother. It is just as right and as moral for people to talk of small families and to demand them as to want large families. It is just as moral.

If we let, as we are supposed to do, nature take her course, we will say that we know that any woman from the age of puberty until the age of the period of menopause that that woman could have anywhere from 15 to 20 children in her lifetime, and it will only take one relationship between man and woman to give her one a year to give her that large family. Let us not forget that.

Are we today, as women who wish to develop, who wish to advance in life, are we willing to spend all of our time through those years of development in bringing forth children that the world does not appreciate? Certainly, anyone who looks out to that will find that there is very little place in the world for children. And besides, if a woman does spend all her time in child-bearing, do you know that even with a healthy woman, that if she does this one out of ten of those women who have children as often as Nature sends them, dies from child-bearing? One out of every ten of women who let nature take her course and have from 12 to 16 children die from child-bearing, and furthermore, there are many cases where it is absolutely indispensable for a woman’s health, for her life in fact, to have means to control birth. There are cases as Dr. Knopf said, of syphilis, cases of tuberculosis; do you realize that out of every seven women who have tuberculosis today that four of them die, not from tuberculosis, my friends, but they die from pregnancy. They die because they have not that knowledge of birth control, because physicians and all the others who should be disseminating information and safeguarding these women’s lives are not giving them the fundamental things to cure her disease, but they allow her to become pregnant. They keep her in ignorance from this particular knowledge that should assist her in recovering her health. Not only with tuberculosis, but there are other diseases that are inimical to the woman’s health and happiness. Heart disease is another thing that pregnancy absolutely stimulates and it means a woman’s death. Not long ago there was a young girl who came to me who had kidney disease. She was a telegraph operator. Her husband was a young working man, but he was not able to support a family. She had on two different occasions tried to have children, but she had kidney disease and they found her in convulsions, she had froth at her mouth and she was taken to a hospital in a serious and critical condition. When she did this, the only thing they could do to her was to resort to abortion and yet they send her back to her home, to her husband and family again in just the same way with no information of how to protect herself against another condition just as she had gone through. That is what happens to our women today, even those who are suffering from disease where they should be protected with means and knowledge of birth control.

The only weapon that women have and the most uncivilized weapon that they have to use if they will not submit to having children every year and a half, the weapon they use is abortion. We know how detrimental abortion is to the physical side as well as to the psychic side of woman’s life, and yet there are in this nation, because of these generalities and opinions that are here before us, that are stopping the tide of progress, we have more than one million women with abortions performed on them each year.

What does this mean? It means it is a very bad sign if women indulge in it, and it means they are absolutely determined that they cannot continue bringing children into the world that they cannot clothe, feed and shelter. It is a woman’s instinct, and she knows herself when she should and should not give birth to children and it is just as natural to trust this instinct and to let her be the one to say and much more natural than it is to leave it to some unknown God for her to judge her by. I claim it is a woman’s duty and right to have for herself the right to say when she shall and shall not have children.

We know that the death rate, maternal death rate, has not been falling in the United States of America, although the death rate from diseases has been falling. That shows woman is given the last consideration in scientific and medical lines. But then woman will never get her own freedom until she fights for it, and she has to fight hard to hold and keep it. We know too that when the children that come to this mother against her will and against her desires, when they come into the world, that we have an appalling number of 300,000 babies each year in this country who die each year before they reach one year of age—300,000 if you please, and it is safe to say and anyone who has gone among these mothers and these children—it is safe to say that the great percentage of these children that are born have been unwanted. The mother knows that that child should not come to birth, when the five or six or seven that she has have not enough to eat. That takes common sense and every working woman has that common sense.

We have these 300,000 babies, this procession of little coffins, and we shake our heads sadly and say something must be done to reduce the number, but nevertheless we go right on allowing 600,000 parents to remain in ignorance of how to prevent 300,000 more babies coming to birth the next year only to die from poverty and sickness.

We speak of the rights of the unborn. I say that it is time to speak of those who are already born. I also say and know that the infant death rate is affected tremendously by those who arrive last. The first child that comes—the first or second or third children who arrive in a family, have a far better chance than those who arrive later.

We know that out of a thousand children born that 200 of them live [sic] when they are either the second or third. When the seventh arrives there are 300 that die out of that thousand, and by the time that the twelfth child arrives, 600 of this thousand passed away, and so we can see that the man or woman who brings to birth two or three children has a far better chance of bringing them to maturity than if they continued to have nine or ten or twelve children.

Those are facts. They are not generalities or opinions. The United States Government stands behind these facts. Then we also, through our maternity centers and child welfare means and other means, we finally rescue some of these children, and do not allow them to die under one year of age, and then when the mother is pregnant again—if maternity was not forced upon her—she would be able to bring that child through. Another one begins to come, and we find that this child that was rescued from dying during its first year now succumbs before its fifth year, and then we have 150,000 children who die before they reach the fifth year of age and so we can enumerate all of these conditions which are so despicable and so difficult in this country because we will not get to fundamentals. We will not deal with the cause of things while we are anxious to deal with the cure. When a mother does finally bring her children through the adolescent period, what is the next thing she has for that? We find in the South that where children come according to Nature, every year and one-half, that as soon as they are able, they are shuffled and hustled on in to take the place and compete with their father in the factories. That is the place that society has for children of the poor. We find in other states, too, where it is only a question of a few years later that also the children as soon as they are able to take their place in industry, are pushed out of home, not because the mothers of these children are not just as anxious to see them in universities and colleges but because of the pitiless earnings that she must have to support those who are coming behind them.

Most of us know this. We know something about the actual conditions of life as it is among us. In some of the factories of Lowell and Fall River, Mass., it was found that of the children who work and toil there, under ten years of age, that 85 percent of them come from families of eight—their mothers have given birth to eight children—and we find in the south very much the same thing, excepting a higher percentage of 90 to 93 percent of the children there.

That is not the only thing. We have conditions again that are more disastrous to the race than child labor or infant mortality, and that is the transmission of the venereal diseases to the race that is to come.

We know that the mothers and fathers of today produce the race of tomorrow, and know that unless we have a clean child and a clean stream of blood pouring through that child that the race of tomorrow is a doomed foregone conclusion. We know, too, that out of this terrible scourge of disease that we have 90 percent of the insanity in this country, due to syphilis. Anyone who is dealing with fundamentals would know that these people should use means to protect themselves against having children. They should absolutely in due regard to themselves, to their children and to the race, not allow a child to be born while that disease is running riot in the system, and then we have that terrible consequence which is insanity.

We have fifty percent of the still births of this country, in other words, dead babies, that are dead when they are born—50 percent are due to this disease. You may think that these things are taken care of, but if I told you that they are not—syphilitic women today are allowed to bring forth progeny even in the face of all officialdom, and all the kind and humane things and other kind of things that are doled out to women today—that women are bringing forth children when they themselves are syphilitic.